Serial bomb blasts. Check.
Innocent lives lost. Check.
Spirit of Mumbai applauded. CHECK.
Innocent lives lost. Check.
Spirit of Mumbai applauded. CHECK.
This time there isn't even an itch to know who the culprits are, and what their agenda is. It sounds trivial to hear our politicians' take on it. Nothing shown or said by the media matters. There's nothing anybody is saying now that they haven't already said before.
But it's time they stopped using that pathetic cliche about the "Spirit of Mumbai". When we continued with life after the first blast, we were naive. After the second, we erroneously thought that it would be the last. And for every subsequent blast, it's just been a force of habit. Random acts of terrorism are so frequent now, it's become mundane. We take it as a given. We are so conditioned by it, we almost forget it's not meant to be a part of our routine.
We have roughly 20 lakh families residing in our city. Yesterday, 21 citizens were killed and another 150 were injured. So out of 20,00,000 families, a maximum of 200 families were severely affected, and only those many are grieving today. They are the only ones thinking about critical care units or funeral arrangements. That's a small ratio. And that is precisely the reason you supposedly see life back to normal. That's the reason you see people on the streets as though nothing has happened. Indeed, nothing did happen to their immediate families.
We don't step out on the streets to symbolize our strength and unity. We step out due to a lack of empathy. We step out because our neighbour's loss is not our loss. Life doesn't go 'back' to normal. It had remained normal to begin with for somebody who was no where near the blast sites. There's not a lack of fear in the city, there's a lack of feeling. We are not calm, just cold.
So don't tell me we are fighting gallantly, when we are in fact succumbing silently. We are NOT a city surging forward with "Spirit". We are just a city seeped in apathy.
